She felt strangely tired and quiet. It was going to be hard to seem as glad to be back as she ought. Yet the world, as they drove out to Nancy, was rioting in bud, and new leaf and bloom. Magnolias were uplifting giant ivory cups of heavy sweetness; every tree-trunk, rail and stump bore a clambering weight of yellow jasmine bloom; the tai-tai drooped pendulous fringes of faintest fragrance, and wild convolvulus ran riot over the palmetto. There were bird-song and sunshine and ecstasy everywhere.
And she could not feel glad, she could not feel glad.
Promptly Molly dragged the girl off to their room. She looked slighter and more wistful-eyed and bored to death. “You promised me that we would go early in March, if I stayed out here—you promised, Malise. And I’ve stayed. You promised we’d go to The Bay, where there are people and hotels and it’s gay. And it’s March now. You look so tall and cold, Malise! what’s the matter?”
Alexina, restless and absent, wandered out on the porch to the Captain. She chatted to him about Louisville, but there were sharpening angles about his face that made her heart ache. She went up to Mrs. Leroy’s room.
“I don’t know what we are going to do, Alexina,” Charlotte told her. “Willy said I was not to think or worry about it, I was to put it all aside until he got back. But it hurts. He went off looking so gaunt. I don’t believe he slept a night through after the freeze; all hours I could hear him up, walking around, but he don’t like it if I notice, you know.”
Alexina dropped down and put her head in Charlotte’s lap and cried, and Charlotte patted the girl’s wealth of shining hair and cried too.
But since he could go without a sign to her, Alexina could go too. That day she wrote for rooms at The Bay Hotel. The answer came that she could have what she wanted by the eighth. She told Mrs. Leroy she and Molly would go on that date.
She could leave without a sign too, she had said, but in her heart there was joy that Fate had given her to the eighth. She would not have moved a finger to stay, but since he was to return on the sixth, why—
But the very day the letter from The Bay reached her, a Seminole came up from the glades with game from King and a note. The party was considering making a longer stay, he wrote to his mother, so she need not worry in case he did not return.
“I told him in my answer,” said Charlotte, “that you all were going. Dear me, I’ll miss you so.”